I See You (Oracle 2) (6 page)

“I don’t trust her as far as I can throw her,” he muttered.

“You could throw her pretty far.”

“Exactly.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets, following after Kandy and Tess. I carried the salad up into the RV to get it out of the heat before dinner.

Gary and Tess had popped for their insanely expensive RV when he’d taken early retirement. Tess still took contract work with one of the colleges in Vancouver. She taught first- and second-year sociology, not that I had any idea what that actually entailed. The study of people, maybe. Anyway, the RV was plush. Like a high-end apartment. Lots of fabric and wood and full-sized appliances. Beau thought it cost easily a hundred and twenty grand. They also towed a practically brand-new Jeep behind it, which Gary had tried to pay Beau to ‘tune up’ more than once in a thinly veiled attempt to put some extra cash in our pockets.

I tucked the salad in the fridge, which was crazy full of food. Fruit, veggies, and at least a dozen types of cheese. I didn’t look too closely at the marinating steaks. I usually stood upwind of the grill when Beau and Gary were cooking.

I was pouring myself a glass of water when the vision mist took my eyesight. Thankfully, the glass didn’t break as it dropped into the sink. I managed to turn off the water, then just gripped the edge of the counter as I waited for the mist to clear or resolve into something more.

“Rochelle?” Tess whispered. I hadn’t heard her return to the RV. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” I got the word out politely enough, but I couldn’t pretend to be completely okay. I didn’t know the RV well enough to wander around it as if I wasn’t blind. I was glad I was still wearing my sunglasses, not that I was sure Tess would be able to see anything weirder than my eyes normally were.

“I was just grabbing beers for Kandy and Beau,” Tess said. Her tone was completely normal, as if I wasn’t standing there staring straight ahead like a moron and holding myself upright. The mist rolled around in my mind’s eye but didn’t resolve into anything. I loosened my left hand and fished my necklace out of my tank top.

Tess stepped up next to me, brushing her shoulder lightly against mine as she retrieved the glass I dropped, then turned on the water.

I gripped the raw diamond of my necklace so tightly in my palm that it hurt. Then I just tried to relax into whatever my magic was attempting to manifest. Chi Wen had said I could use the diamond as a focal point, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to accomplish that feat. Thankfully, the mist started lessening rather than increasing.

Tess touched the top of my right hand, loosening my grip on the counter and passing me the full glass of water. “Drink,” she murmured. Then she stepped away to open the fridge.

I lifted the cool water to my mouth. My hand was steady as I drank. The mist clouding my sight cleared further, until I could see the interior of the RV again. The kitchen window faced the neighbor’s RV pad. They had three kids, close in age, and a golden retriever.

“I’m okay,” I finally said, though without looking away from the comforting reality before me. “It’s just the edge of a migraine.”

“I know,” Tess said. “Drink another glass, then join us. Gary and Beau are building a fire on the beach. We’ll have s’mores for dessert.”

“Okay.”

Tess left with the beers. I poured another glass of water, noting that Tess had dried off the glass before she’d filled it for me. My hand started to shake. I hadn’t had to cover for the visions for over a year. I was out of practice. But Tess hadn’t cared. I pressed the glass onto the counter to still my shaking hand.

I’d been completely weird and Tess hadn’t cared. I would have heard it in her voice. She was the kind of person who was open like that.

I drank the second glass of water, poured a third, and then wandered outside to watch Beau and Gary joke around while they barbecued our dinner. I wasn’t the only one who Tess and Gary had accepted, no questions asked. I wasn’t the only one who secretly wanted to be accepted like that.

That was why we came for dinner whenever we were invited. Or answered emails and text messages, even if Gary was just sharing RVing articles or Tess was sending vegan recipes I was never going to try to cook.

I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out what Gary and Tess wanted from us long term. It was pretty obvious with them being childless and all. What was weird was that Beau and I had just accepted the older couple in our lives without question as well.

∞

So even I had to admit that making s’mores by a bonfire as the sun set over a crashing surf only steps away was pretty fun. And Tess had bought vegan marshmallows for me. Yeah, she was extremely cool like that.

During dinner, Gary happily tossed two more steaks on the grill when Beau and Kandy attempted to eat their combined weight in red meat. Tess split a bottle of red wine with Kandy — some fancy Pinot Noir she and Gary had picked up from a winery on their way down to the coast. Then they discussed the bouquet and taste profile of the wine as the sun dipped in the horizon.

All and all it was a pretty weird dinner, almost … homey, and a seriously stark contrast to my vision of the dead girl.

While I sat by the fire, Kandy and Beau wandered away down the beach to train and Gary puttered around cleaning the barbecue. Next to me, Tess was knitting a sock with double-pointed knitting needles that looked deadly enough to take someone’s eye out.

I dug my toes into the sand and burned my final few marshmallows layer by layer. I would peel off a layer after it bubbled, eat it, then return the skinless, skewered marshmallow to the fire to repeat the process.

Kandy flipped Beau over her head. He landed on his back in the sand, laughing.

Worried about this display of strength, I glanced over at Tess.

She smiled at me and kept knitting. “They’ve known each other for a while?”

“Friends of friends, I guess.”

“What kind of martial arts is that?”

“Mixed.”

“I keep asking Gary to take tai chi with me.”

“But Gary thinks he’ll just fall asleep upright,” Gary said with a chuckle. He sidled up behind us to dangle a half-full glass of wine over Tess’s head. “Going once …”

Tess sighed as if she was terribly put upon, but she set her knitting aside to take the wine. She twirled the ruby liquid in the glass until it looked molten in the firelight … like molten blood …

The vision hit without warning or mist. One second I was watching Tess’s glass of wine and burning the roof of my mouth on a too-hot marshmallow. The next, I was watching dark crimson blood spread out from underneath a young woman’s head.

I cried out before I could stop myself. I clamped my mouth shut, turned my head away from Tess, and started frantically digging around for my sunglasses in the pockets of the sweater I’d borrowed from her.

“What is it, Rochelle?” Tess asked, her voice barely a whisper.

I shook my head, unable to focus on answering her as the vision reset. Or maybe it was restarting from a beginning I hadn’t yet seen.

In my mind, the back of the blond girl’s head smashed onto the asphalt, somehow denting it. Then her head lolled to the side, her murky brown eyes staring out at nothing. Blood seeped slowly out from underneath her hair to form a pool on the ground.

And repeat.

I moaned, squeezing my eyes shut and abandoning my search for my sunglasses.

“What is it?” Gary murmured, moving closer behind Tess.

“Will you get Rochelle a glass of water?” Tess asked. “Oh! And her satchel from the chair there. Do you want Beau? Should I call for Beau?”

I managed to shake my head as the vision repeated a third time. Becoming numb to the sudden violence, I saw more detail. Or perhaps I was just starting to understand what I was seeing.
 

The blond falling … her head and shoulders hitting the ground at the same time. The angle suggested she was falling from a height, rather than just tripping or being knocked down.
 

The asphalt denting underneath her head indicated that it was hot where she was dying, or going to die. Hot enough to soften the blacktop. I’d seen that only once, on an August day when I was seven or eight in a newly paved area of East Vancouver. It rarely got that hot on the West Coast, but I assumed the phenomenon wasn’t that unusual.

Yeah, whatever magic wanted me to see, I saw. Now, following Chi Wen’s guidance, I just tried to not let it overwhelm me.

“Beau said you might need your sketchbook.” Tess was pressing my satchel into my hands. Or she was trying to, at least. I released my hold on my necklace to take the bag from her.

The vision stopped repeating, leaving me staring down at the dead blond as if I were crouched beside her. Except I wouldn’t be crouched there, not when this actually happened, because the visions were never about me.

“Thank you,” I managed to mumble to Tess, even as I was wondering what exactly Beau had told her about my need for a sketchbook.

“Gary has water as well. Will you drink?”

“No, thank you.”
 

Firelight kissed the paling-with-death cheeks of the dead woman, and for a moment, I thought the vision was expanding. Instead, it dissolved until I was once again staring at the bonfire before me. “Thank you,” I muttered again, already digging in my satchel for charcoal.

Tess brushed her fingers across my shoulder, then stood and started tidying up the dinner with Gary. How they weren’t hounding me with questions or staring at me as if I was insane, I had no idea. And I didn’t have any time to dwell on it, because my left hand was itching like mad. Itching to draw what I’d seen, to capture the image on the page and hold it there.

Why? I had no idea.

I just did what it told me to do.

I started with the woman’s eyes. Hunched over my lap, I found a fresh page and pressed the charcoal to form the arch of her eyebrow and the curve beneath her eyelid. I’d feather and smudge the lines later. Now, I simply sketched out the skeleton of her face.

I wasn’t sure how much time I’d spent drawing, but it wasn’t terribly long before Beau threw himself down beside me in the still-warm sand. He was winded. Kandy circled around behind us and chatted with Gary, but I couldn’t hear their words.

“Vision?” Beau asked. His tone was hushed and confused. “You should have called me.”

“It’s okay.” I didn’t lift my head from my task. Beau brushed his fingers against my bare foot, just lightly enough for me to feel it.

“You’re too cold.” He rolled to his feet and padded away.

Again, I could hear conversation behind me, but I was more concerned with the blond’s face. I just couldn’t capture the look in her eyes … the nothingness of her eyes. I was on my third attempt, and frustratingly, the vision was fading. As if by committing it to the page, I was erasing it from my mind.

Beau dropped a fleece blanket over my shoulders. Then he stilled, looking over my head.

“Should you be touching her?” Kandy asked quietly. I hadn’t heard her approach.

“Doesn’t seem to affect the magic,” Beau murmured. “That’s the blond woman, Rochelle? The dead girl?”

Kandy glanced back over her shoulder warily, but I was fairly certain Gary and Tess had gone inside their RV.

“It’s not finished,” I said stubbornly, hunching my body farther over the sketch to block it from his sight.

“You know her?” Kandy asked.

Beau didn’t answer, but his hands tensed on my shoulders.

Kandy swore, loosing a vicious string of words under her breath.

Adrenaline flushed through my system as I turned to look up at Beau. His eyes were the green of his shapeshifter magic as he gazed down at me.
 

“You know her, Beau?” I asked.

He nodded, looking away from the sketch and out across the fire toward the dark ocean. “I bought her the lip stud for her seventeenth birthday. Two days before I left,” he said.

I wanted to jump to my feet suddenly. I wanted to race across the darkening beach, to flee the truth spilling from Beau’s lips. The truth brought forth by the vision. A vision of death. A vision I was suddenly and irrationally sure was going to tear us apart.

But I didn’t. I reached up and touched my cold fingers to the back of Beau’s warm hand on my shoulder.

He shook his head as if clearing it. “She’s my sister. My half-sister. Ettie.”

“Ah, shit,” Kandy said. Then she stomped off.

Beau crouched down next to me. I closed the sketchbook and lifted my charcoal-covered hand to touch his face.

“She’s dead, then?” he asked.

“Or going to die.” My voice caught in my throat, but I couldn’t lie to him or soften the blow in any way.

He nodded. “Okay.”

I dropped my hand, placing it on the closed sketchbook balanced on my bent knees. “Okay?”

“Yeah. Not our problem.”

“But if I’m seeing it …”

He shrugged and looked back out at the dark ocean. “The far seer said you’d pick up things from the Adepts you spend the most time with.”

I abruptly felt as if I couldn’t really see him, though he was fully lit by the fire before us. I couldn’t really hear him with the surf roaring in my ears. It was as if a dark, thick veil had dropped between us. I wanted to reach up and rip this barrier away, but I didn’t know how to do so.

“You could call,” I said, instead of confronting the slow dread that was hunkering down in my belly for the long haul.

“Yeah, I could.” Beau straightened, reaching his hands down for me. “Let’s say goodnight and go to bed.”

I tucked my sketchbook in my satchel, then let him lift me to my feet. Beau’s family wasn’t my business. He never even spoke of them. But something about his reaction scared me, as if a yawning pit of silence and secrets had opened between us. A pit that might swallow us up …

I brushed away the silly thought as Beau laid his arm across my shoulders and tugged me closer.

“Kandy’s not bunking with us, is she?”

Beau laughed. “Overleaf Lodge.”

A flash of murky brown eyes tugged my attention back to the vision. I opened my mouth to ask Beau about his sister, but then Tess poked her head out of the RV.